Between disconnection and connection: The paradoxes of Cold War export controls

Abstract This article reinterprets Cold War multilateral export controls not simply as mechanisms restricting access to strategic technologies, but as sites of mediated connection within Cold War globalisation. Moving beyond a US-centred framework, it examines West Germany’s experience of the China embargo under ChinCom in the 1950s and the liberalisation of controls in respect of China within CoCom in the 1980s. It asks how regimes designed to enforce technological disconnection generated new forms of global connectivity, arguing that this transformation can be understood through Western alliance asymmetries and CoCom’s role as an institutionalised site of transit. In the 1950s, embargo enforcement produced alternative re-export routes and unintended transnational connections. In the 1980s, competitive alliance manoeuvring revealed CoCom’s regulatory architecture as a space of negotiation where technological circulation was enabled, delayed, redirected, or politically obscured. A case study of Messerschmitt-Bölkow-Blohm illustrates how these dynamics operated in practice. By tracing mediated technological circulation across different phases of controls in respect of China, the article reframes Cold War globalisation as shaped by dis:connectivity: the mutually constitutive interplay of connection and disconnection.